Locked (21 page)

“Is Sherlock Holmes here?” he asks, his arms crossed over his uniform. “We were told this was his new place of residence.”

“Mycroft in my business again,” Sherlock says in a low voice.

I point at him over my shoulder. “Yeah, that’s Sherlock. Sorry, he hates introductions. What’s wrong? Did he do something? He probably did something.”

“Your faith in me is touching, Irene.”

I jab him in the ribs with my elbow.

“Ouch. Officer, I think you might want to arrest her for assault.”

“I’m not here to arrest anyone,” says the policeman, eyeing us warily. “We’re just here with some follow-up questions about the fire. Mr. Holmes, I was hoping you could provide us with the names of anyone who might have a grudge against you.”

“Certainly. Let me get you a list.” Sherlock disappears back into the house.

I frown. People with grudges? “But I thought it was an accident.”

The policeman checks his watch. It’s almost lunch time. “Evidence points to arson, as a matter of fact.”

Sherlock reappears holding my school directory. “Here you are.”

The policeman takes it and thumbs through the first few pages. “Is this a joke?”

“It’s really not,” I say. The word
arson
is cycling through my mind.

When the policeman has given up on us and left, I slam the door and whirl on Sherlock, who is picking disinterestedly at the dust on the hem of his shirt. Like he actually couldn’t care less about the revelation that someone tried to burn his house down. “That fire wasn’t an accident. Someone
did
that.”

“Obviously.”

“
Obviously
? You knew?”

“I always know. The smell of gasoline, the unfamiliar footprints on my lawn, the broken window downstairs. They might as well have spray-painted
arson
on the driveway.”

“You’re telling me,” I say, breathing heavily, “that you knew someone set your house on fire and you didn’t tell me. You didn’t think to mention
it.”

“I thought you knew. Like I said—obvious.”

“Well, it wasn’t obvious to me.”

“What are you so upset about?”

“What am
I
—Sherlock, someone tried to kill you! For the second time!” It’s a good thing Mom’s at work because I’m yelling at the top of my lungs.

A fact which doesn’t seem to bother him.. “No one’s tried to kill me since I set foot in this town. Apart from Mycroft attempting to annoy me to death.”

I am completely still. I want to strangle him. Whoever’s trying to kill him would love that.

“The party incident wasn’t a murder attempt. It was petty revenge,” he says. “As was the fire. There was no car outside my house when they came. They must have thought I was out.”

“At three in the morning?” The smartest person I’ve ever met is also the stupidest person I’ve ever met. “We have to talk to the police. Tell them someone’s got it out for you. You can’t just not acknowledge murder attempts as murder attempts.”

“True. I can, however, acknowledge things that aren’t murder attempts as things that aren’t murder attempts. Which is exactly what I’m doing.” His voice is calm. Almost amused.

I shove him so hard his back hits the wall, knocking a picture frame askew. He’s strong enough to stop me, but he doesn’t. “You need to take this seriously. Please? I’m—”

And out of nowhere, for no reason, my throat is burning and my eyes feel wet. I step back quickly. What the hell is my problem?

His eyes widen minutely. And then he’s lightly touching the side of my face, for such a brief second I almost miss it happening. “I won’t let anyone kill me, Irene Adler.”

I’m so embarrassed. I want to run upstairs and hide. At the same time, I want to grab his hand and hold it tightly. But I can’t. Because it’s Sherlock Holmes, and he’d probably ask if I was trying to cut off his circulation or something. “It would be nice if you were saying that for your sake too, and not just mine.”

“As a matter of fact, I have a vested interest in my not dying.”

“All evidence to the contrary,” I say, borrowing one of his pet phrases.

“Let’s make an agreement, then.” He pushes off the wall, catching my eye. “A new agreement. I’ll agree not to die if you agree not to put yourself in danger to try and stop me from dying. An example, say, would be you not running into a burning building after me. Just assume I’m not in the burning building.”

“You can’t always not be in the burning building.” I say to the floor. I should just be friends with the floor. Nobody’s ever tried to kill the floor. “Sometimes you might not have a choice.”

“Here and now, I agree never to be in any burning buildings again. Or whatever you’re using the burning building as a metaphor for. Will you agree to that?”

“I don’t—”

“Please, Irene.” He tips my chin up with his finger so I have to meet his eyes. I’ve always hated seeing that in romance movies, but when he does it, it’s not condescending. It’s vulnerable.

“Okay,” I lie.

“Excellent,” he says, snapping back to his usual self in an instant. “Then let’s go waste an afternoon splashing paint on the wall.”

I follow him slowly up the stairs.
I’m the reason he’s staying. And now someone here is trying to kill him.

If that person succeeds, it really will be my fault.

“May I conduct an experiment?”

|||

(written on the back of an old report card belonging to Carol Adler)

There are over a hundred thousand diseases that affect humans. Over twenty-five pressure points on the human body that cause death if appropriately struck. Five vital organs that can withstand very little damage before they fail. Human skin is paper. Nearly every object that one could bother to name can be used to take a life.

It is distinctly irrational to entrust one’s heart to something so fragile.

The turritopsis dohrnii, a species of jellyfish native to the Mediterranean, is effectively immortal. It is capable, through the process of transdifferentiation, to revert to its younger colonial stage after exhausting its body at the solitary stage. It regenerates.

It is far more rational to care about a turritopsis dohrnii than a human being.

Though it is doubtful that there is a turritopsis dohrnii who would buy coffee for me when everyone else thought I was a murderer, who would knock on my door to wake me up in the morning because she knows I hate the sound of the alarm, who would be so irrational as to care about someone belonging to such a breakable species as humanity.

Conclusion: This would be really be much easier if she were a jellyfish.

|||

Living with Sherlock Holmes is easier than I anticipated.

Which isn’t to say it’s easy. There’s the time he tries to impress Mom by guessing how long ago she’d gotten her hair colored, based on the extent of the grayness around her roots. And the time he decides to use the bathtub to observe the growth of mold on a steak in a bright but damp environment, after which I extend the ban on kitchen experiments to bathroom experiments. And the time he falls out of the window and nearly breaks his neck because he’d been trying to evade the smoke detector by sticking himself as far out the window as possible.

There was definitely all that.

But the things I like outweigh the things I don’t. I like sprawling on the couch with him after school, our legs touching, me reading the assigned book for English and him reading something about the ability of light to escape black holes. I like forcing him to watch every classic movie he hasn’t seen—which is pretty much every single one, like
The Matrix
and
Mission Impossible
and
The Breakfast Club
, and hitting him with a pillow to make him quit vocally unraveling every plot hole. I like it when he helps Mom make dinner, correcting her with a chemist’s precision on the exact amount of cayenne pepper she should use. Turns out he’s a good cook when he doesn’t turn it into an experiment.

I like falling asleep knowing that he’s breathing somewhere nearby. I like the fact that the room downstairs is no longer a room I’m scared to enter. I like seeing him in bed. He’s kind of amazing when he’s in bed, lounging, his shirt rumpled to expose an inch of skin.

School is not the best. School is mostly ignoring the comments as we pass. School is trying not to get angry. Sherlock never gets angry. But some people are on our side—like Robyn—and the fact that I get to sit next to him in class, reading texts about the hilarious things he deduces about our teachers, makes it worth it.

It’s all very worth it.

And it’s okay if sometimes I dream things about him that leave me flushed to my core. It’s okay if sometimes I can’t stop staring at that sliver of hip bone, or those cheekbones, or the way the dark hair meets pale skin at the nape of his neck. It’s okay, because I know what he is. This is enough for me. To be able to look at him and smile.

Until one Sunday night.

“We’re going on a date,” he declares, throwing open my door.

“You could knock.” I push aside my biology homework and roll upright on my bed. Then the full force of what he’s said hits me like a blowtorch. “What?”

“A date. We’re going on one. Perhaps you should get your hearing checked, Irene. You seem to say ‘what’ rather a lot.”

“Notice I only say it when you’re talking? It’s because you’re the only person I know who says such ridiculous things.” I swing my legs over the side of the bed and then we’re facing each other, and I can’t quite bear to ask him. But I’m up, so I have to do something. I pretend to search through my drawers.

He leans against the wall. He’s always leaning on things, like it’s too boring to hold himself upright. “If you’re looking for your diary, I confiscated it.”

I close my eyes and count to ten, silently thanking the gods of every religion that I’d had the common sense not to write anything about Sherlock Holmes. “And why did you confiscate my diary?”

“
Today I had an algebra test and I think I did well. Next week I have to remember to study my notes for Mr. Jennings because he always has more pop quizzes when it gets colder.
Something that boring should be illegal.”

“And yet you memorized it.” I yank my dictionary from the bottom shelf, page to the P’s, tear out an entry and slap it against his chest.

“Privacy: confidentiality, discretion, secrecy,” he reads. “Are you trying to make the point that next time I should keep it secret when I steal your things? At any rate it will save your books from being desecrated.”

“Privacy is what I want, Sherlock. As in you stop reading my diary. And my email, and my Facebook messages just because you’re bored. And no more coming into the bathroom when I’m taking a shower because you’re too impatient to wait ten more minutes to get whatever you wanted to get—”

“I needed my lighter. I left it in there.”

“—
And
no more smoking in the bathroom just because it’s on the opposite side of the house as the smoke detector.”

This happens so often now with us—we start to talk about something important and accidentally fall into that pattern of half-bickering, half-bantering that has become more familiar to me than anything else in the world. And more comforting.

I abandon the dictionary. “Anyway, what about a date?”

“Be ready by eight. Wear something that wouldn’t look out of place in a fancy restaurant.”

And with that, he disappears, leaving me wondering if I dreamed everything between the door opening and the door closing.

|||

What does one wear on a date with Sherlock Holmes?

The real question is what do I even have in my closet. The oversized black jacket I’d rescued from the bargain bin in the men’s section at Goodwill is out of the question. So are the pair of jeans I wear so often that the fabric is wisp-thin in the thigh. I don’t own a lot of things that wouldn’t look out of place in a fancy restaurant.

What I should do is go downstairs and demand to know what he’s really up to.

But I don’t.

What I should do is go downstairs and tell him that we will not be going on a date, now or ever.

But I don’t.

I sit on the bed, inspecting the ends of my sandy-blonde hair, still chopped at different lengths from that time a few months ago, when I’d realized I needed a haircut and had been too depressed to go pay for one. For the first time, I’m understanding what I must look like next to him.

Sherlock: Tall, graceful, sleek, dark-haired, well-dressed.

Me: Short, dressed generally like a cross between a hobo and an alcoholic.

I stuff my face into pillow for a minute before deciding there has to be an easier way to suffocate myself. I don’t know how to be the type of person who goes well with Sherlock Holmes.

Does that type of person even exist?

Eventually, I settle on the only elegant thing I own—a black dress, a few tiny fake pearls sewn into the neckline. Carol gave it to me when she grew out of it. “Wear it somewhere fun,” she’d said. “You’re always studying. You need some fun in your life.”

I only wore it once, to her funeral.

It’d been a little too big for me then, but I’ve gained some weight since I met Sherlock, and now it fits perfectly. I twine my hair into a lump at the base of my neck and after three tries, manage to achieve a messy that comes off as intentional rather than grade-school-ish.

My reflection in the mirror doesn’t look like me. I look like Carol.

“Are you ready yet?”

It’s him, opening his door for the millionth time without knocking. I immediately feel like an idiot in my hand-me-down dress. He’s wearing a suit that fits him perfectly, gliding across his chest and dipping in at the waist. It’s the same dark shade as his hair.

“You look…” I start, but don’t finish.

For once, he doesn’t try to complete my sentence. He scans me once. A slight frown tugs at his mouth and he looks away too quickly. “Come on, then.” And he disappears down the stairs.

Well. Nice to know early on that he disapproves. I take one last look at myself in the mirror, a weight settling into my stomach. I’ll never be someone who doesn’t look out of place next to Sherlock.